Ordinary Nothing

The rising supply of restaurants, combined with their tendency to congregate, causes a
problem. Parking places get added in a pace that doesn’t match.

More and more people find their way to the same general areas on evenings (OK, the problem
is usually only on weekends), with their cars (There’s hardly any public transportation
after around 22:00, and public transportation isn’t that hot even on peak hours).

The only people that seem to notice are those who charge for parking. This is a good
business. Over time free parking areas are purchased from the municipalities and converted
to payment parking lots. And people pay money to park there.

What nobody seems to notice is that overall it’s bad for business. True, if you want to go
someplace specific, and there’s no free parking available, you’d get into the lot and pay.
But that’s not necessarily the usual case.
This complaint/suggestion is mostly relevant for areas that contain a concentration of restaurants, or
other places that attract people for social meetings.

Normally the procedure is not one where someone decides they want to go eat at place X, and
then try to get company. It’s that someone wants to meet with person Y (or more), and wants
a place to do it at.

Since you meet, you have to meet someplace. If you go out (Doesn’t happen much with some
people, but those are not relevant for this discussion) you need to go someplace, and
usually that would include food/drink/something-of-the-sort.

Obviously the decision on where to meet depends on the possible places. But since most such
places to tend to clump together in specific areas, on many cases the question isn’t a "Let’s go to X" one in which X is the name of an establishment. If many cases it’s the decision of what area to go to, and the specific X is selected only once you’re already there.

Why prefer one area over another?
Notice, I’m not talking about what X can do to make X more attractive to customers, I assume X either does this anyway, or X is a very transient thing and doesn’t matter.

One reason is the selection of establishments in each area. There’s nothing much an owner of X can do about that to get more clients. If X could encourage other attractive places in the area, this would bring more clients overall, but they won’t necessarily go to X. The same apply in the other direction, removing competition makes the overall area less attractive, since only people that originally wanted to go to X will come.

Another reason is specific tastes. If someone desires a certain type of food or entertainment, the preference would go to the areas providing more of these. Nothing much to do here either, for similar reasons.

Another one is variety. Someone that likes familiar things will stick to the same area. Someone that likes to diversify would check their less popular areas occasionally. Nothing (much) to do about the former, but the later are a specific case of the general problem, either how to make them go to X’s area, or how to make them stick to X’s area despite it being familiar.

Another is ease of getting to the area. This includes nearness to the starting point (homes or offices) which X can do nothing about. But this also includes parking. And that’s something that X can do something about.

Does parking matter? Yes, very much. It matters on two separate levels.

The first level is for the one-time visit.
Let’s assume that people who already drove to the area, and are synchronizing the meeting with other people, will not leave but stick to the same area.
If there’s easy and free parking, the people will get someplace, maybe X, do what they want to do, and buy what they want to buy.

If the parking costs money, some people will consider that as a cost to be taken out of the budget for the evening. If the parking was cheap, it’s not a real issue. If not, it can even go as far as create an attitude of "How much more could I spend on one evening for one meeting? This is too expensive". Resulting in them buying less. If they go to X, they may order cheaper courses than they would have ordered otherwise. Or skip dessert, or the extra drink. This is bad for X.

If parking doesn’t cost money, but is hard to find, the effects can be similar. Instead of getting near X and parking, people drive further and waste time driving over and over in the area looking for an empty spot. They will get to X annoyed, and in a sour mood (or at least somewhat less happy than they would have otherwise). It can go either way, since they may order more to cheer up, or order less since they’re pissed off.
The stronger effect would probably be to the order less direction. If there’s a time-limit, they’d get there sooner, so may skip the latest purchases. The time wasted can be considered in similar terms to money paid for parking. And they may arrive in a bad attitude thinking about the effort they’ve already made to arrive to X, so X should better be worth it, meaning that X will suffer due to the increased expectations.

The second level, and the more serious one, is what happens next time (and all the times after it, of course).

Overall prices tend to roughly even out for similar places, so establishments on the same business as X in other areas will charge similar prices. The exact offers, food, drinks, and such would also be roughly similar.
So when deciding on which area to go and look for places to hang out, someplace that would offer the same things with less cost would be better. Between two similar areas, with similar establishments, one where free parking is available, and one where parking needs to be paid for, the choice will become obvious.

It won’t happen overnight. Variety and habits have a strong role. But it will happen.

Except for those rare cases where X is specifically sought after, people will go where they don’t need to pay for more than what they wanted to buy. And where they don’t need to work hard and waste time for it.

It makes a lot of sense, both common and economic.

In addition that, it also seems to match actual facts from the real world. On a busy evening, areas with free parking have more cars than the paid parking lots do.
This not only goes for two lots one next to the other, this works across city boundaries. Amount of cars per parking-spaces where parking is free is higher before the peak times. And there’s more movement, since people don’t feel that they wasted their parking money if they go away someplace else once they’re done. Overall there are more people around in areas where parking is free.

So providing more free parking places will get more people before the rush hours. At the maximum peak this effect is smaller, since people may prefer to pay instead of wasting time searching for a place to park. And since people know that there’s room at the paid parking lots.
Notice, this is because there’s room at the paid parking lots after the free places get crowded. People prefer to park for free. And they therefore spend their money in areas that provides this free parking, since that where they are.

In addition to that, on the really busy times, weekend evenings, some parking places manage to get filled regardless. If there’s no parking at all, people will go elsewhere. If they can’t get into X’s area, then X won’t have them as customers. So more parking places overall is anyway a good idea, free or paid.

Personally, not that I’m representative or anything, but if I observe where is it that I spend most of my meetings-with-friends time, and what causes me to move to other areas, parking is a major issue.

There are a few areas I’m not longer getting to, despite some really nice restaurants there, since I refuse to go around 30 minutes in my car hoping to squeeze into a tight parking space.
There’s another area I don’t get to since it’s impossible to park there for free.

As long as there are alternatives, these places just lose me, my friends, and likely a lot of other people.

If for some crazy reason the trend will continue in the direction of not providing more parking, but taking payment for previously free spaces, we’ll go more to the areas with cheaper parking, or those where search times are lower. Or meet at one of our homes instead.

To conclude, what can X (be X a restaurant, pub, coffee shop, or anything of the sort) do to get more customers?
Help build parking lots, and help make them free.
It’s worth it for businesses in an area to pay for the creation of parking lots. And to pay for those to not charge customers.

I was looking at my referrer logs (currently not yet a time consuming task, if anyone wonders), and saw that someone decided to ask Jeeves how to "stop customers switching from margarine to butter".

I guess the reference was due to this entry re trans fats (although as usually happens they got to the home page, much after the relevant post was no longer there).

Margarine is bad and unhealthy. It’s to be expected that customer who switched to it from butter, mistakenly believing it’s the healthier alternative, will go back to the better tasting (and healthier) original. And yet there are those who want them to stay… I assume margarine sellers, since apart from greed there’s really no reason for anyone to so…
If this was before the US elections, it would have been worth checking whether the margarine industry supports Bush or Kerry…

Unless… Hmmm… There is another option for people who will want to keep everyone on the health-hazard alternative… Terrorists!
This must be it! I’m not sure if it should fall under bio-terrorism or under usage of chemical weapons. Maybe both.
Osama must be eating fresh butter, and laughing gleefully of all the westerns killing themselves with their margarine.
Listen customers! Switch from margarine to butter, or the terrorists win!

During the last few years it has become a well known fact that trans fats (aka trans fatty acids) are evil. Nowadays, out of the long list of things you really shouldn’t be eating, trans fats probably take first place. Shocking news to all the people who replaced butter with margarine because they thought it was healthier, but that’s scientific progress for you. (While we’re at it, I’ll also take the opportunity to comment that eggs are healthy as well, so long as you don’t eat more than about 3 per day)



Knowledge about the dangers of trans fats is so well spread, that almost everyone have heard by now. Including the owners of a certain large bakery here. Only they must have heard it in conversation, not writing, and didn’t quite make the effort to check what all the fuss is about.

The one important thing they did notice is that it’s considered bad, so customers must be told they don’t get trans fats in their foods, or they’ll stop buying, and the bakery will lose revenue.

Ergo, I recently saw this label on bread packaging:



This bread does not contain the fatty acid “Trans”



They got the name right. Only it’s not a name, but a type.

Not sure if this label is really reassuring. Since they don’t know what they’re talking about, how reliable is their claim that they don’t use it?

Can I be sure it’s not just that the owner asked the baker “Say, are you using any acid fats by “Trans” company?”, got a reply that “We’re not putting in any acids at all in our fat, just plain margarine”, and decided everything is alright then?